The Best Way for Liberals to Win the Sotomayor Nomination is to Oppose It!

It is one of those curious ironies of life that the best thing that liberals could do right now would be to oppose the confirmation of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. Why? For many reasons.

Opposing Sotomayor will make it more likely she is confirmed. It is simple politics (a game that the Democrats are still not all that good at playing). Let’s assume for a minute that there is any chance at all that Sotomayor will not be confirmed by the Senate (which there isn’t). It will still be better for liberals, especially those on the extreme left, to oppose her. After all, if all conservatives oppose Sotomayor, but all liberals support her, it makes her look like an extreme liberal. It just doesn’t help when the website for “Marxist Thought Online” has nothing but good things to say about Sotomayor.

If both the extreme right wing and extreme left wing oppose her, that is comforting to moderates, who are then more likely to support her. After all, Sotomayor may be a liberal, but she is a fairly moderate liberal, just like Justice Souter, whom she will replace (coincidentally, both were originally appointed by Bush Sr., a Republican).

Also, having liberals oppose Sotomayor will actually make it more likely that Republicans will support her. Because if they succeed at blocking her nomination, then the left could force Obama to nominate someone much further to the left.

However, liberals should still oppose her. Why? In order to understand why this is the best thing for liberals to do, you need to understand why the extreme right is opposing her, even though they know she is a shoo-in.

The real issue here is not Sotomayor, it is the next Supreme Court justice that Obama appoints. It is virtually certain that Obama will get to nominate at least one, and probably two or more justices to the court. The key is the ideological balance of the court. Souter was considered a liberal, so replacing him with another liberal doesn’t change that balance. But what happens if a conservative justice retires?

The reason the right is making so much noise about Sotomayor (when they have no chance of blocking her) is so that if Obama appoints a liberal to replace a conservative justice in the future, they will be positioned to block that. They can say “we let you appoint an extreme liberal to the court last time, we can’t let you change the balance of the court”. To do this, the Republicans have to paint Sotomayor as a hard-left liberal.

They claim she is in favor of reverse discrimination because of a court case where some white firefighters were denied a promotion. What’s hilarious about this argument is that that particular case was unanimously decided on the basis of the law, while the right is claiming that the result wasn’t fair. This is from the same people who argue loudly against activist judges — saying that judges shouldn’t employ empathy, that they should only rule on the law and the constitution — but they hypocritically attack her for not being an activist in this case.

They claim that she isn’t smart enough. This one is truly hypocritical. She graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton and was an editor of the Yale Law Review. Does Karl Rove consider this evidence that she is smart? “Not necessarily. … I know lots of stupid people who went to Ivy League schools.” But back when people were calling Dubya stupid, Rove defended him by pointing out that Bush went to Yale and had an MBA from Harvard.

The real problem here is that the Republicans have once again defined the debate about Sotomayor, forcing Democrats to defend her, even against stupid and easily disproved smears, and even though their defense of her actually hurts her more than it helps. Will the Dems ever learn?

Can Dems stop defending Sotomayor? At the very least, they should ignore conservative attacks on her. But even better would be to use this fight as an opportunity to attack the conservative right. After all, the Bush administration spent eight long years destroying our constitutional rights, ignoring the rule of law, writing memos saying that torture is legal, and politicizing the jobs of federal prosecutors and judges. If the Dems play their cards right, it could be the GOP that is on trial and not Sotomayor during the confirmation hearings.

4 Comments

Daniel wrote:

You need to go read Credo. They are claiming that even though Sotomayor is a closet Republican and anti-choice it’s best not to oppose her nomination. Why? Because if liberals succeed in stopping her, Obama will appoint someone even more to the right.

I think it’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. That’s what happened with Harriet Miers, right? But there seem to be a lot of people who believe it.

I think the truth of the matter is that this was a stupendously brilliant pick by Obama. He knows that at the end of the day liberals will confirm a pro-life, anti-free speech judge rather than oppose a “woman of color”. And he’s absolute right.

The model for the Sotomayor nomination is not Souter. It’s Clarance Thomas.

Harry Truman said it best. Give the public what they want and give it too them good and hard.

I wasn’t proposing that liberals stop her, in fact I was suggesting that by opposing her, liberals will make her more likely to be confirmed. And set things up for an even more liberal justice in the future.

Yeah, I got that. But what I am saying is that the people at Credo are saying is that opposing her is only going to get someone further to the right, now or in the future. That’s what they believe. So their theory is the exact opposite of yours. They think by not opposing her liberals will be good troopers and more likely to get what they want in the future. They want to look like they don’t oppose her when they really do. You want to look like you do oppose her when you really don’t.

What I am saying is that both those theories (yours and Credo’s) are wrong. Liberals should stand up and fight for what they believe in and let the chips fall where they may. You think Democrats don’t play politics well. I think the problem is that they play politics at all.

Someone once said about the Abolitionists during the Civil War that the secret to their politics was that they had no politics. Amen. If you’re not playing the game they can’t play you for a fool.

Unfortunately, the Dems are playing politics, but they are playing by the Republican rules. They are letting the Republicans define the conversation, yet again. So far, the liberals are acting like Sotomayor is the best possible choice for the court.? Have we lost our capacity for critical analysis?

2 Trackbacks/Pingbacks

[…] I have already noted that the case conservatives protest the loudest about, Ricci v. DeStefano, involving reverse discrimination against white firefighters, Sotomayor was clearly following the law. But that doesn’t stop Rush Limbaugh from howling: [Sotomayor} ruled against the white firefighter – Ricci and other white firefighters – just on the basis that she thought women and minorities should be given a preference because of their skin color and because of the history of discrimination in the past. The law was totally disregarded. […]